Methods for division of road traffic network for distributed simulation performed on heterogeneous clusters

Abstract

The computer simulation of road traffic is an important tool for control and analysis of road traffic networks. Due to their requirements for computation time (especially for large road traffic networks), many simulators of the road traffic has been adapted for distributed computing environment where combined power of multiple interconnected computers (nodes) is utilized. In this case, the road traffic network is divided into required number of sub-networks, whose simulation is then performed on particular nodes of the distributed computer. The distributed computer can be a homogenous (with nodes of the same computational power) or a heterogeneous cluster (with nodes of various powers). In this paper, we present two methods for road traffic network division for heterogeneous clusters. These methods consider the different computational powers of the particular nodes determined using a benchmark during the road traffic network division.